ROLF
ROLF FOCUSED ON THE marigolds beyond the toy store doors. Calendula officinalis. It was easier to think about plants than about the kids staring at him. When he had started classes at Oxford, four years younger than every other university student and the only red-haired kid in his dorm, they’d teased him incessantly. Now he didn’t even have his glasses to hide behind. Their abductors had taken them—and yet, as he blinked, his vision was inexplicably perfect.
“I must have hit you too hard, brother,” Leon said. “That’s insane.”
A glance at Leon’s tattooed face sent Rolf’s fingers spinning the gears on the combination lock faster. His twitchiness was a bad habit, he knew, but not an easy one to break. “It’s called an infinity paradox. It exists, but only theoretically. I’d wager that if you followed any of these paths, eventually you would end up back where you started. There’s no way of telling how far the boundaries are, or if there even are boundaries. It’s highly theoretical.”
“So we’re trapped?” Nok’s beautiful eyes were full of fear. “Even though there are no walls or bars?”
Rolf froze. Staring was all he could manage with Nok. The pink strand of hair perfectly framed the left side of her face, a geometric wonder. He had first seen her standing on the boardwalk, hair tangled in the breeze. Her face had looked defiant—but he’d been wrong. The moment she’d turned and seen him, surprise had flashed over her features, and then tears. Big, rolling ones. She’d thrown her arms around him, never mind that he was a stranger.
He shoved at glasses that were no longer there. “Ah . . . yes. Trapped. I also believe the infinity paradox is responsible for the headaches we’ve all been complaining about. Our minds can’t handle this much unpredictability.”
He thought his logical explanation would put her at ease, but Nok went pale. Stupid. He’d never been confident around girls, especially beautiful ones. He came from Viking descendants; wasn’t he supposed to be beating his enemies with sabers and ripping trees in half? All the Vikings ever gave him was an unmanly shade of strawberry hair.
Cora tugged on his military jacket, getting his attention. “What about the ocean? There’s no path in the water that can loop a person back. Maybe someone just needs to swim out far enough to get past this infinity paradox.”
Rolf paused to consider this. It most certainly wouldn’t work, but at least she was displaying creative thinking, which was more than he could say for the others. “Perhaps, but judging by the fact that a girl already drowned, I’m not sure it’s the best course of action.”
His fingers found the comfort of the combination lock gears, spinning them again. He hated being put on the spot. Back in Oslo, all he’d wanted was to live in the flower garden at T?yen, near to where his parents worked. He’d spend hours digging around the Rosa berberifolia and Bellis perennis. Dirt used to ring the beds of his fingernails, brown-black and permanent, like it had been tattooed on. You can’t play in the dirt, min skatt, his mother had said, washing off the dirt. You were made to use your brain, not your hands.
He sighed, squinting at the small etched numbers on the spinning gears of the combination lock, blinking hard, still confused by his perfect new vision. He’d seen numbers like the ones on the gears before. It was a Fibonacci pattern even the most basic math student would learn: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, and a blank for the last number.
On impulse, he spun the final gear until the next number lined up with the others—twenty-one—with a satisfying click. A copper-colored token rolled out of a trough at the base of the counter. There were strange grooves on either side of the token . . . a foreign language, or symbols. He inserted the token into a slot above the trough to see what would happen.
A glass door swung free. Hundreds of peppermint candies rained to the ground.
He cursed, jumping back as the flood of candy hit his feet. The others jumped back too. The falling candy was the only sound in the room, along with a sweet smell that made him famished. It felt like forever since he’d eaten anything. At Oxford he’d had lunch every day at an Indian takeaway place just below his dorm . . . he’d kill for a curry now, or for his mother’s egg-butter cod with flatbread, or even one of Snadderkiosken’s overcooked burgers.
Cora crouched down to inspect the candy. “How’d you do that?”
“The numbers on the combination lock form a simple sequence.”